


Three Points In Time

by Self_Indulgent_TMNT



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Daleks - Freeform, request
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 19:05:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15225873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Self_Indulgent_TMNT/pseuds/Self_Indulgent_TMNT
Summary: Written as a request for someone.The Daleks have invaded Earth, led by someone new, someone unknown, and the TARDIS conspires to make this a multiple Doctor issue. 12 is sent to join 11 and, out of some mix of practicality and selfish, guilty motivations, they go on to call in their younger self. The Time Doctor.A face from the past, and from the future, arrives with the answers they need.But will saving one civilisation make up anything for the pain of losing their own?





	Three Points In Time

Earth, relatively little planet in the grand scheme of things, and compared to all the problems the other, bigger planets have, interplanetary wars and the like, it really doesn’t have much to complain about. God (if there is one) only knows why people keep trying to invade the damn place. You’d think the inhabitants would be used to it by now. And yet they still panic every time, just like they did this time when Daleks appeared in the streets with their massive guns (compensating for something?) and their terribly tedious and unchanging voice and set phrases. Most humans didn’t bother resisting, complaining that they didn’t have any training or something, as if that was a legitimate excuse. This problem was even worse in England, where the stereotype of being unwilling to do much more than write a strongly worded letter proved to be true for most.  
The TARDIS decided her Doctor could help out the few brits who actually resisted this newest invasion and he let this happen, because he didn’t actually have a say in the matter as he tried to get to one place and time and ended up in another, in war torn London. Somehow he always ended up there, a statement which is particularly true in this case since it seems he had actually been then and there before, a revelation which startled him as he staggered from the TARDIS, who hadn’t exactly crashed but had unceremoniously dumped herself and her passenger (the Doctor hadn’t actually been her driver in a long time since the machine did as she pleased) on the tarmac of an empty London street, and found himself looking at the a face he knew very well, which you’d expect since he used to wear it. There were two other faces beside his past self, the him he’d been before being this him (pronouns would be confusing if he thought about it enough to care), one had fiery hair and a fiery expression, seemingly annoyed someone else was in the TARDIS, and the other seemed confused. He’d literally always been confused, the Doctor reflected.  
“I was wondering when you’d show up” The Doctor, well, the previous Doctor, the past him (Christ, if they were expected to work together this would be confusing) said.  
“What?”  
“Doctor, who is this?” The confused one, Rory, asked.  
“Yeah, and why is he in the TARDIS?” the redhead, Amy, added.  
“Because it’s my TARDIS” The Doctor, the newest arrived Doctor (he really did have to work out a pronoun and noun system), “nice accent by the way” he added, unable to resist Scottish pride despite not actually being Scottish.  
Amy’s glare became a little less pronounced. “You’re Scottish?”  
“Actually, I’m from Gallifrey, it just so happens I have this spectacular accent”  
“Gallifrey? You’re a timelord?”, Amy seemed surprised, which confused him since the answer was fairly obvious.  
Rory turned to the Doctor, the other Doctor. “Do you know him?”  
“I’d hope he does, considering I am him” The Doctor, let’s just call him 12 to deal with this outrageous name issue, said.  
“You mean you’re a past regeneration?” Rory asked. 12 snorted.  
“He’s a future regeneration” the other Doctor, we’ll call him 11 since a lot of other people do, informed his assistants, companions, whatever we’re referring to them as nowadays. “Don’t think about it too hard, your brain will probably hurt”  
“Yes, yes, but now that we’ve got that out of the way, why were you expecting me to show up?”  
“Daleks led by something we don’t know that we can’t beat, seems like a two timelord situation if you ask me. Don’t suppose you remember this from my perspective, do you?”  
“Sorry I don’t, this is a first time for me. Daleks you say?” 12 replied, finally fully exiting his TARDIS to stand beside his past self.  
“Daleks” the previous Doctor, 11, confirmed. “They’re being led by someone else, though, controlled somehow. They have even less capacity for original thought now than normal, it’s like someone is feeding them orders. The local resistance have been investigating for weeks but all they know is the leader calls themselves the Hood and seems to have some way of communicating with the Daleks without actually talking”  
“Oooh a mystery, I love a good mystery, not so keen on a bad one, though, not at all thrilling” 12 said.  
“I’m pretty sure this is a bad mystery” Rory said. Amy continued to stare at 12.  
“If you’re him”, she pointed to 11, “and you’re not actually Scottish, why would you sound Scottish?”  
“I don’t know, why do you sound Scottish?”  
“Because I AM Scottish”  
“Well there you go then”  
“What?”  
“I’m confused” Rory put in, but since that was his constant state anyway that didn’t really seem necessary to declare.  
“Good, now let’s go and do something useful”  
Doctor number 11 and his companions took Doctor number 12 to the London branch of resistance, who caught the new arrival up on everything they knew and a great deal they didn’t know, which led to some sarcastic comments from 12 as I’m sure you can imagine. 12 was determined to work things out, he really was, he had all the experience of his younger self and then some, but two days into his stay and he’d made absolutely no progress whatsoever. People were losing patience with his special brand of frustration, apart from Amy who felt really quite at home with his angry Scottish yelling. Someone suggested that maybe the Doctor wasn’t the one who could save them, they were instantly told to shush because of course the Doctor would save them, it’s what he does, but it got the Doctors thinking. One Doctor wasn’t enough, neither was two, it seemed, maybe three. It wasn’t unheard of for 3 Doctors to get together, although it wasn’t exactly fun or easy where pronouns are concerned. Perhaps there should have been bigger issues when they came together than pronouns, rips in the space-time continuum, issues with the wibbly-wobbly stuff, etc., but no, it was the pronouns everyone struggled with.  
But London was overrun, as was much of the country and many more countries, so it seemed it would be three Doctors or nothing. The one they had in mind, the one they thought may just have had the experience and personality (yes, they all had the same experience, but things blur and fade with time), was busy avoiding his own problems, Doctors 11 and 12 remembered that too well. The time war… Other things faded, but those memories remained. The pain never left but was buried and thinking about it brushed the dust off and brought it back.  
Maybe bringing him out of his time-war based misery, well founded misery, would help his pain a little. The Doctors claimed they called him because he could help, but, somehow, they both communicated to each other how that wasn’t the case without ever saying it. Secretly, as deep down as most of the pain and regret, they hoped that if they helped him save this planet, now, it would help them. Hopefully time would compensate and if they helped him work through some of his pain then some of theirs would go too.  
Maybe.  
And so, with their real motivations and their pretend ones in mind, they found UNIT, never hard to find when an alien invasion was in place, and UNIT used their unknowable resources to get a message through. The TARDIS phone might have worked too, but Doctors rarely rang each other and UNIT provided a stamp of urgency it was difficult to otherwise convey.  
And, to everyone’s surprise, a 3rd TARDIS showed up exactly where it was needed.  
She was good like that, the TARDIS. The Doctor inside it, on the other hand, was not quite so obliging. He staggered out of his TARDIS with a scowl on his face, a scowl which deepened when he saw the two Doctors, plus Amy, Rory and a selection of rebels awaiting him.  
“I do not appreciate being summoned” he snapped.  
11 shrugged. “Who summoned you?”  
“It was simply an invite”, 12 added.  
“Not a very polite one” the new arrival grumbled. He then looked the people in front of him up and down with a critical eye. “So, which of you is me?”  
Those for whom the answer was ‘yes’ raised their hands. The Doctor’s nose wrinkled in disgust. “Dear gods, what happened to me? Too young and too old”  
“You’re no spring chicken yourself” 12 threw back, having had quite enough of the ‘old’ comments he’d received in this newest body.

 

News came through of the appearance of someone new on the scene. Someone quite painfully familiar to the Doctors, someone with whom they had a rather complicated relationship which had spanned lifetimes. He’d been found on the street, bleeding out and left for dead, found by some rebels who’d been trying, and failing, to clear the Daleks out of that part of the city. His face was still a relatively fresh memory for 11, a blurring one for 12, but the youngest of the three found it to be new. He didn’t react the same way when the others saw the person, presumed human, who’d been brought in.  
“We found him a couple of blocks away, he seems to still have a heartbeat but it’s all a bit weird, we can’t seem to figure it out”  
“That’s because you’re listening for the wrong heart” Eleven put in. The room, those who knew little of Time Lords anyway, looked confused.  
“Oh get out of the way” Twelve said, forcing his way into the middle and listening to the chest of the man before them before proceeding to do CPR over the left side of the man’s chest.  
“He’s already got a heartbeat, though” someone pointed out.  
“One, yes, he needs a second”  
The person seemed about to question, but a look from someone beside them indicated they shouldn’t it would be too much to think about and not entirely necessary.  
The room watched, allowing the Doctor to take on a more literal form of his name for a moment as he coaxed the second heart of the man before him back to life. Then the man’s eyes shot open and he gasped, taking a deep breath for the first time in quite a while. But it was not in his nature to seem alarmed, and so when he looked up and saw a roomful of people above him he made assumptions as to who they were.  
“Doctor”  
“Master”  
“Fancy seeing you here”  
“What on Earth are you doing here in the middle of all this?”  
“Oh come on, Doctor, I just nearly died, give me a moment”  
“Fine, take him, let him rest”, the Doctor told a couple of people stood by him, but before they could help the Master up and take him somewhere he could receive medical attention 11 stopped them, his eyes latching onto the Master’s. “There will be questions, you will have answers”  
The Master just blew him a kiss.

 

The Master recovered, although it was generally believed he should have died. He always had been stubborn where regeneration was concerned, and he quite liked this face. He told the Doctor, in all his present forms, that he didn’t want to risk being old again, taking the opportunity for a remark about the various ages of the man before him, too old or too young, he said.  
The Master was an excellent resource of information. He’d been on the other side, deep within the enemy’s council you could say, but he had a habit of seeking power and the Hood had decided that couldn’t be allowed to stand. The Master was lucky he’d decided to keep his true origin from the Hood, and that he had the ability to resist his telepathy, otherwise the job of killing him would probably have been done a lot more thoroughly. His bitterness towards his more recent ally overrode that towards the Doctor, he had greater plans to get one over on his old friend and enemy, keeping information from them now seemed pointless. The enemy of my enemy, and all that.  
He was imprisoned, giving what information he would when asked, but never quite giving it all. His help did, however, allow some improvements to be made. Resonance frequencies, weapon designs, such things allowed the weapons held by the rebels to be improved, made more efficient, there were three sonic screwdrivers present after all. Not that UNIT really needed these improvements, but the lower level, ordinary people in the rebellion were thankful.  
They fought on day to day. Daleks attacked humans, humans attacked Daleks, the Doctors helped. Well, two of them did, their youngest form did not wish to help, did not wish to do much but return to where he had been and wallow in the grief of worlds and species and endless years.  
Then the Master spoke up without prompt. He saw Eleven not far from his makeshift cell, tinkering with a computer to try and help it detect the Hood’s weapons.  
“It was a technology”  
The Doctor looked up. “Sorry?”  
“Cyberman in origin but with a couple of alterations. That’s how I kept Hood from my mind. I know you’ve been wondering”  
Eleven wandered closer. “Could it work for someone else?”  
He popped his bottom lip out in obviously fake thought. “Don’t see why not. It’ll be a bugger to get, though, can’t imagine how you’ll find some. Apart from in the tomb of the cybermen, I suppose.” He was still pretending to be pondering what he said, but the /Doctor had no doubt this was a pre-planned conversation.  
“Why tell us this now?”  
The Master’s expression changed from thoughtful to cheeky. “I think you’re cute in this face”  
“Don’t mess with me”  
“Would I do that?”  
“Absolutely and without hesitation”  
“Aww, Doctor, you know me too well. I could get used to this you, much better than the last one, he was so serious. And the two others here now, it’s like they’ve got the weight of worlds on their shoulders. No time for fun. But you, I feel like you might enjoy a trip to the old tomb”  
“Will you tell us what we need? And how to adapt it?”  
The Master sighed. “I really thought you’d be more fun than the others. But fine, I’ll tell you what you need. If you let me go”  
“You’re not getting out of here”  
“You’re not getting any information”  
“I’m not negotiating with you, not after what you’ve done. I know you too well”  
“You don’t know me at all”  
“That might be worse”  
“Oh come now, Doctor, this isn’t getting us anywhere. Time’s ticking, people are dying”  
“You can save them if you help us”  
“You can save them by letting me out”  
The Doctor paused, thinking.  
“Tick, tock, Doctor”  
“You will be under constant supervision, Amy and Rory will be with you always to make sure you do as you’re told, you will help us adapt our weapons to theirs and once this is all over you will crawl back into whatever hole you came from. Do you understand me?”  
The Master pouted again. “You take all the fun out of it”  
“Do we have a deal?”  
“Fine, fine, fetch my handlers”

The Doctors left, headed to somewhere they were never keen to visit. The tomb of the Cybermen was as unsettling as ever, but useful too. The technology the Master had told them to fetch was obscure, but could be acquired. Although after scanning and searching they only found one functional full set of parts. Making it wearable would be a problem, but they’d force that out of the Master if it became an issue, although with 3 versions of the Doctor working it out should be easy. If they could agree, which seemed to be almost impossible. Eventually, back in the TARDIS (after some argument, they’d gone in Eleven’s as it was in the best state of repair), they set the parts out in front of them and, using the complicated and contradictory instructions the Master had burbled at them, they put together something at least similar to the intended device. They eyed it suspiciously.  
“It could be dangerous” Twelve said, “I mean I don’t exactly feel comfortable letting something we botched together based on the instructions of a lunatic anywhere near my brain”  
“The Master says it’s safe” Eleven replied  
“He also said ‘I’m glad to see you’, he’s not exactly prone to telling the truth”  
“Well someone has to wear the damn thing”, their younger self spoke up “and, while I’d be delighted to be rid of the two of you, I don’t think me dying would do anyone any good since, you know, you’d die too”  
“He makes a fair point” Eleven said, Twelve sighed. He looked at the modified tech.  
“Fine, I’ll wear it. God I hate paradoxes”

So it was Twelve who risked frying his brain, and who risked whatever else the Hood had in store for him. He went alone, the others stayed with UNIT and the resistance. Eleven had wanted to come, to help, but he understood why he couldn’t.  
If the Doctor had known where he was when he started out on the list of directions the Master had given him to find the Hood’s base he had absolutely no idea when he was finished. There had been alleys and stairs and he’d passed through a couple of buildings. The space he found himself in was dimly lit, but large and slightly echoing. There were consoles and screens and dividing walls with information on them. Alien technology sat on shelves and in piles on the floor. The smells of dust and damp hung in the air. It was hardly the organised, impressive space he’d expected.  
Footsteps alerted him he wasn’t alone, slow and careful, the sound echoing as his adversary approached.  
‘The Hood’ peered out from under a dark cowl, matched by the dark robes they wore, making identifying anything about them difficult and making their name fitting, and they spoke in a voice the Doctor felt he should know but didn’t.  
“I was wondering when you’d get here” they said, no note of surprise evident.  
“You knew I was coming?”  
“You always come. It’s what you do, who you are”  
“Who are you?”  
“No one of consequence. You, on the other hand, are legendary”  
“Are you in charge of the Daleks?”  
“In a way. In many ways, actually. They’re awfully good soldiers”  
“Why are you doing this?”  
“What? All of this?”, they gestured around as if indicating everything, the city and the world that kay beyond it and the devastation there. “You don’t mess around with foreplay, do you”  
“People are dying out there”  
“People are dying everywhere, only thing makes these ones different is you care about them”  
“What do you want?”  
“You”  
“Me?”  
“Well, your pain. I want you to suffer, I want as many Doctors to suffer as possible. I want to make your heart burn, like my home burned”  
That was somewhat unexpected.  
“What?”  
“You may not remember my home, Doctor”, the name was spat out like it tasted bad, “but I loved it. Innocent people lived there, people I cared about. And you, you doctor, you carer, you saviour, you let it burn. You were none of those things back then, you were just a soldier, an enemy, a monster”  
“The Time War…”  
“It always comes back to the Time War, doesn’t it?”  
“Who are you?”  
“Just someone who wants to teach you a lesson. This is quite a lovely world, and now I shall have it. I shall destroy it. I shall tear your favourite world apart and make you watch”  
“And how is it you plan on doing that?”  
“I have a trick up my sleeve, it’s really quite clever. Something I picked up a long time ago”  
“You mean telepathy?”  
The Hood’s breath hitched. “How do you know about that?”  
“You little friend, the one you kicked out, they’re an old friend of mine, too”  
“The Master betrayed you far too readily to be a particularly good friend”  
“We’re more acquaintances of habit than of choice, but either way he still gave me all the information I needed”  
“At a price, no doubt. Let me guess, freedom?”  
“No, satisfaction. He wants you dead”  
“I find that unlikely”, there was an arrogant air around the Hood that can only be created by a supreme belief in superiority. This was a dangerous person, anyone who believes too strongly in themselves is.  
“You’re going to have to come with me, I’m afraid”  
“I don’t think so. You see, as much as I wish to hurt you with this world I think I shall have to settle for merely scarring it, I’ve come up with a much better way to hurt you, Doctor. You desire information, understanding, security. You like to know who you’re facing and know you’ve fixed a problem. Well I won’t give you the satisfaction. I’m going to eat you up, never leave you. I’ll go and you’ll have so many questions that they burn you. You burned my home, Doctor, I want you to know that. I want you to live with it. Remember me, know that I am out there somewhere, taking my revenge by letting you remember”  
The Hood lifted up their wrist, a metallic band glinting in the half-light. They pushed a button, shimmered slightly, and were gone. Transported. Where? He didn’t know.  
He stood for a long moment and watched the spot where they had been, tried to work out who they were, who wanted to toy with him like this. Who wanted him to suffer not by dying but by living?  
But fighting carried on above him and a particularly loud bang brought him bac to the present, to the issue at hand. The Hood could wait a while, he needed to get rid of the Daleks.  
The obvious solution, of course, was to use the technology around them to transport the Daleks somewhere far away and difficult to leave. Twelve stared at some panels for a minute until he located the word ‘Transporter.’  
“Sometimes they make it too easy” he muttered to himself. He located the signals of every Dalek on Earth and hit ‘transport’, nothing happened. He pushed it again. Still nothing. He pointed his screwdriver at it, the display flashed up with a ‘sonic signal not powerful enough’, something which alarmed him slightly, but only until he saw the ‘sonic power’ button. So that was how all this stuff was powered.

Three Doctors lined up before a console, three moments in a timeline that wove across all others, that dotted back and forth across all of time and space. And they stood with their screwdrivers, 3 screwdrivers, all different and somehow the same. They pointed their tools at the console, at something built by someone they’d hurt, just one of many whose lives they had destroyed, and, with the kind of synchronisation only achieved with intense practice or by being the same person, they powered it up.  
There should maybe have been more to it than there was. It felt like there should be fireworks, like a fanfare was needed, some music rising to a crescendo perhaps. But there was nothing, only a little positive bleed telling them transport was successful. Outside things were a little better, people reacting at first with surprise when their enemies disappeared, and then with joy when they were assured it was over.  
The Doctor had saved the world, again. They tried to feel good about it.  
12 didn’t tell his younger selves of the Hood’s motivation. He made up some story based on elements of all the times he’d saved Earth before and hoped it would be believed enough to let them sleep at night. The others didn’t need to know, they didn’t need that weight on their shoulders. Not until they were him, anyway. They didn’t need another reason to hate who they had been.  
The Master? Gone. They always left, no matter who they were. Slipped away, presumably the same way he’d got there in the first place, and he left the Doctor alone again. No matter how many people the Doctor saved, no matter how many he travelled with, he was always alone at the end.  
The TARDIS was lined up in a row of three, three different versions of the same time machine, three different points in time. It almost hurts the brain to try and work out how there can be three different points of the timeline of a machine that crosses all of time and space all in a line, somehow being the same but different. The members of UNIT tried not to think about it too hard as they watched all three disappear with the tell-tale sound that meant safety to so many. The Doctors inside, and the two humans with one of them, would have unusual memories of the events. Only one Doctor would remember, the humans would remember, too. The 11th and 12th Doctors hoped they would forget, hoped their younger self would remember so that the pain might be less. They hoped that maybe saving one civilisation would help with the pain of losing another. They so desperately hoped that, hoped that their own memories of pain would fade a little even if they didn’t know why. But really, they all knew who would remember, and the 12th Doctor felt the pain of that keenly as he disappeared to some remote corner of existence in his TARDIS to wallow in the pain of victory, to wallow in the pain of knowing that he remembered what the others would not know until they were him. Somehow it all seemed a little meaningless. They’d saved London, saved Earth, again. And yet their own selfish motivations were worth nought.  
But the job was done, and the Doctor remembered fondly a time when he was 11, and remembered with pain the time when he wasn’t the Doctor at all.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as a one-time request for The DoctorwhofelltoGreenhill, I'm not open for requests but they asked nicely :-):-)  
> The request was as follows: There is an attack on earth, it appears to be a Dalek invasion lead by a human. The Tardis takes the Twelfth Doctor to war torn London resistance only for him to run into his Eleventh self and Amy and Rory. Amy and Twelve get on both being Scottish. This new enemy appears to be something that even the Doctor isn't sure how to beat. Not even two of them are sure, maybe it'll take three, although one is currently avoiding his own problems. (here I was thinking the eighth Doctor avoiding the time war but if you'd rather write another Doctor here then you feel free to). They'd contact him through a direct message from UNIT to prove its important. I was thinking maybe have the enemy leading the Daleks called the Hood is a mind reader hence he has the ability read Daleks mind and prevent them from using their weapons. The Simm!Master would appear on earth although he'd be loyal to the new enemy, with technology to stop the Hood reading his mind. The Hood would betray the Master and leave him for dead, knowing he'd plot to take over for himself, while the Eleventh Doctor would save the Master (this would give them time to interact as I wish we'd seen this on the show) as the Doctor's develop weapons to be more efficient. Meanwhile the Daleks attack the Soldiers and the other Doctor's fight back then the Master tells the others about Cyberman leader technology being able to block the Hood reading minds. So The Master stays on earth with Amy and Rory keeping him on the right side while the three Doctor's break into the tomb of the Cybermen to get the technology. They argue about how to make the technology wearable plus who should use it. Twelve says he's the latest and if it goes wrong the others early regenerations would be paradoxical so it should be him. So they argue while the other Doctor's go to the war field against the Daleks Twelve goes to stop the Hood. Really someone who wants to show the Doctor that his favourite world should suffer like the War Doctor made his world burn during the war. When the Hood is stopped the Twelfth Doctor tries to use the Hood's technology to teleport the daleks but the other Doctor's come to him as it requires a triple Sonic wave to work so all three Doctor's use their sonic screwdrivers. The Master uses his screwdriver to access the teleport and runs away in his Tardis. While the Doctor's leave before UNIT does a clean up forcing them to help out. The Doctor noting that his other selves will forget.
> 
> It's up to you to judge how well I fulfilled it, but I hope you enjoyed what I came up with! As with all the requests I've done, this presented a couple of unique challenges but I think I've done ok. If we only ever did the easy things we'd never grow as writers, I guess.  
> Anyway, I hope you liked it. :-):-)


End file.
